Chilaquiles Verdes

hi everybody thanks for hanging out in the kitchen with me today is chilaquiles now I don't know about you most of you probably had chilaquiles but to me just the thought of chilaquiles makes my mouth water it makes me think about comfort food probably chilaquiles is the most comforting comfort food in the world and I say that being a kid did not grow up on chilaquiles but still I love them because there's something about that texture I guess you could say it's sort of the macaroni and cheese if you will of Mexico and culture I like chilaquiles better bass the green ones made with tomatillos there are also lots of different varieties you can have the ones that are made with a tomato sauce that would be the other sort of major version that's vying for a place with the tomatillo version but there's also ones that are made with red chili sauces like guajillo sauce or pasilla sauce they can get a much more intense a little less comforting I would say but there are really delicious and and right for certain occasions so I'm gonna do this quick roasted tomatillo sauce here and I've taken the husks off of the tomatillos and I'm gonna do that roasting that I've shown you on other occasions where I just cut the tomatillos crosswise around the equator and then lay them in a heavy hot pan my trusty cast-iron pan you're really seeing how I cook here on a regular basis at my home because I love as you've noticed I love cast-iron cookware because it holds heat and it distributes heat beautifully and I find it to be the most manageable some of you will say oh but it's so heavy and it it's heavy but I love it for all the right reasons and I don't mind its heft so I'm putting these all in here this is roasted I'm roasting serrano chiles you could put one or two or even three if you really like it spicy there I want to put a I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this very well and in this now the version of this recipe that I'm in a post will have you putting all of these ingredients on a rimmed baking sheet and running them under a broiler I don't have an easy-access broiler here so what I'm doing is this stovetop roasting which is actually more common in Mexico to do this kind of a roast but I need to be able to put these guys in there somehow - so you know what I'm just gonna do this I'm just gonna cut them up so that I can sort of let them nestle down in there it's a little bit of onion and walking a little bit of char and some cook on that onion as well this isn't the only cooking that's going to be done for this but we'll see I mean I may regret having done this in a minute but we'll see what happens here okay and then we've got some garlic that's got to go in here now garlic takes a while roast classic thing Mexico is to break apart a head of garlic and then without feeling the cloves to scatter them on to a hot surface usually it would be this would all be done on a coma which is a roll typically a rolled steel or an earthenware griddle either one of those things you'll find a lot in mix so what we're doing here is to replicate that sort of with a 12-inch cast-iron pan and what we're trying to do and you notice that there's no oil in this this is not saute this is dry roasting and what we're trying to do is to cook all of these in in a dry heat method which will concentrate flavors and it will bring out some sweet nests in them you won't get that in a saute you'll get sweetness but you won't get this sort of rustic chart it's going to happen now we're not burning everything and this is one of the craziest things is that when you notice when you watch Mexican cooks cook yes they will move toward things being charred but they always stop the moment before it and a lot of young American cooks that see this going they go Oh in Mexico everybody just burns everything and then they throw it all on a blender and blend it all up it is not that now we're letting these things do their dry roasting here but I wanted to show you I'm gonna serve chilaquiles not with a fried egg because all of you know how to do it with a fried egg you've probably seen that you've had it for brunch now this version is going to be the dinner version and in Mexico I will say it is more common to serve chilaquiles with shredded chicken in it than with that egg on the top not unheard of certainly there but we've got have gotten in this country used to seeing it always as a sort of brunch dish okay so I've got a chicken breast here and I'm gonna serve it with the chain breast but I mentioned this the other day what I have here I'm gonna turn the heat up on this what I have here is salted water and it has come to the boil then I turned it down but I'm gonna put this chicken breast in here and when it returns to the boil I'm gonna just turn it off and put a lid on it I wanted to show you that as a really surefire way of poaching chicken you could do chicken breasts as I have here or you could do chicken thighs skin on skin off if it has the bone in it it will take longer in this poaching then if it doesn't have the bone in it so when that comes back to a boil we'll all look at it again okay so I'm going to turn these guys over because they're getting some color on them now I can see that so just go in there and flip them you'll see that there will be a little bit of stuff stuck to the bottom of this pan we're gonna use this pan again to cook this sauce and then the chilaquiles and I won't mind those little sticky bits there for our sauce here you can do this by the way if you have a large nonstick pan you could do it in that but you won't get quite the color and quite the same roasty quality out of it but this is kind of what I'm looking for when I do my split tomatillo roasting here let's see if these these are doing nice - they're getting a little color the the onion I mean the chilies are so put that there okay now these are gonna take another another couple minutes you'll notice as they're cooking that the tomatillos will lose that gorgeous lime green color and they will become more of an olive color have we got this guy back up to the temperature yet no we don't I'm gonna just move him over a little bit I think to a higher burner here and let's see if that will help us to get to the right place turn that guy off I just want it to come to a simmer quickly because then when I cover it I need to let it sit for about 10 minutes while we're finishing the chilaquiles and then we'll just tear it into coarse shreds and mix it in with the chilaquiles okay now while that is finishing cooking because they're getting close to done now I've got four cloves of garlic which I did not put to roast there because they take about twice as long as the tomatillos do so I'm gonna use that other method that I've showed you before I still have the papery husks on these guys but I'm gonna put them into the to the microwave and just put it for a minute to cook there whoops I guess I have to do the two zeroes after it and start and the reason that I you saw me poking a hole in the side of each one of the garlic's is because if they're completely sealed with that papery husk you can hear them explode in there so I'm just leap giving a little bit of release for steam that builds up on the inside so I always just give them a little hook like that I'm gonna take just a little bit more of this onion and set it aside now for some beautiful little garnish on the egg on the chilaquiles here I'm gonna let's see we're about ready here to start putting all of this stuff into our blender jar you'll see that chilaquiles actually are very fast to prepare even if you have to make the sauce but let's talk about that the other option for the sauce that other main option for the sauce which is the tomato one you could do it with the canned fire roasted tomatoes and for this you would probably need about a can and a half of those like 14 and a half ounce cans you would need that much to make the same base as you would for this what we're looking for is about 2 cups of finished finished sauce base you'll see that just here in a second so our our garlic is ready now it's you can see it's steaming up here so I'm gonna pull these guys out to cool off just a little bit there papery skins should slip right off right at the root end if you cut it they it should release right away so I can just do that and then almost just you know bring them out squeeze them out have that they aren't quite hot they're okay so I'm smelling that we're about where we need to be on these tomatillos and the the little chilies in there I can see that the onion has completely softened and that's what I wanted so now we'll put all of this together into the blender jar okay everything goes in yeah when I said I was probably going to regret having put those onions in there it was only because I now have to scrape all those little pieces up and into the blender jar here now why don't I just boil these tomatillos well I guess you could say that I am out of the school of southern Mexican cooks who are really interesting to me and roasting tomatillos in the northern part of Mexico they do a lot are the a lot of boiling but I like the flavor of the roast because I think it brings out a lot more a lot more of that sweet flavor in the tangy tomatillos okay I'm just gonna get rid of this guy I just scraped some of the pieces off there okay because we're gonna come back to this skillet in another minute or so turn the temperature down you can see that we have the mixture boiling here the water boiling here for the chicken so I'll just cover it up there and we're gonna let that sit I didn't get back to it right away so I'm gonna say I it'll take no more than about eight minutes or so to cook it but you do it slowly by once that water comes to the boil you turn it off in just the temperature of that that 212 degree temperature will cook that chicken breast perfectly off the fire so don't keep it going because it'll toughen it okay so this is gonna be for garnish I'll get rid of this piece over here we're gonna blend it now our tante roasted tomatillo a bait sauce base here I've got everything right and I want it to be a sort of course puree so I think we're gonna have that just about right there I don't want to keep it going or do it at too high of a speed so that it comes out completely smooth then it looks like kind of processed food okay back over to our skillet now and I am going to turn the temperature up a bit and I'm going to film the bottom of this pan with some oil it'll take a couple of tablespoons and then we will check to see if the temperature of the oil is right I can see it's starting to smoke a little bit and I can hear that so actually then that's a little too high okay so we'll put this in and stir it as it reduces to like the consistency of tomato paste that's what I'm looking for here I scraped out some of the excess char that was in there but at this point I really do want to deglaze the pan essentially with this tomatillo puree and I'm gonna pick up some of the the charred bits at the bottom because that will make this sauce really really complex and rich that's what I like about this particular thing and because I'm doing it in a big skillet like this it is easy to reduce really quickly to this very thick consistency now I've said it many times but it it is something that I feel like should be repeated regularly this cooking step here is the most important part of cooking this sauce when you are searing everything together in a hot pan and stirring it until it's reduced and thick you actually are fusing all the flavors together if you just simply put that and pardon me into a pan and then you added broth to it and boiled it it would not have the same deep rich resonant flavor so this is a very important step here and it doesn't take very many minutes you can see that in this wide pan like this over a medium-high fire that it is reduced to that thick consistency really relatively quickly I would say maybe three or four minutes in a wide pan like this it will take you a few more minutes than that if you're in a sauce pan but I want to make my chilaquiles in this so that is what I am going to do so I think it's ready now I'm gonna add the broth to it you should have about two cups of the puree so if you're making this with tomato base then you're gonna do it with about two cups of the bay finished sauce same other ingredients the onions the garlic The Sopranos or jalapenos you wanted to use that and then I'm gonna add my two cups of broth to the pan and stir that I want to add now a little bit of salt because we're just gonna let that simmer briefly just very briefly and I'm going to add some salt to it to season but this is my moment to season the whole dish but remember for the that's part of it we're gonna add chips to this crispy tortilla chips if they're salted you have to be very careful how much salt you add to this base mice my chips are I'm gonna want this to have when I taste it to not have the full salt flavor because I know that the chips are going to add I put a sort of salty cheese on top of it as well so I'm get slightly under salted in this and those Serrano's are pretty spicy it hardened me so it hit me in the back of the throat so once this comes to a simmer here we'll be ready to go ahead and add the other ingredients to it so let's talk about that because we have lots of ingredients to talk about number one the thing if back to the etymology of the word chilaquiles it comes from the Aztec which means greens or herbs and chili so when they say herbs and greens it's one big category in sort of the ancient way of thinking in Mexico that you could have episode a and it would be caught same category as say spinach would be they were both sort of green slash herbs they have an herbal quality but you could also put a lot of them in a dish and when you're in central or southern Mexico the one of the most definitive flavors in chilaquiles this are so we've got some beautiful episode a here last week I had bad episode thing but if you look at an episode a leaf it's kind of serrated all the way around the outside there and that will be one of the things that will take tip you off to the fact that it is episode the second thing is that when you smell it it has a sort of pungency to it once you get to it as I said before when we've used episode thing it is just one of the most delicious things on the face of the earth typically cooked with black beans in central and southern Mexico leaves a bitter late into quesadillas when they are made these would be usually corn not flour on the outside flour ones only come from the far northern part of Mexico and they don't use a lot of episode a up there one damn I was doing some working in Guadalajara and I went to the market to buy a Passat they I couldn't even find it in the Guadalajara mom maybe that's changed that was a number of years ago but you would usually think of episode is being definitive of central and southern Mexico certainly the Yucatan Peninsula uses lots and lots of episode a though they call it opposite they out there and when you use it typically you use all of the leaves you don't chop them at all and so I am going to lay these across the top of this it's there it's a delicious flavor once you get used to it but it took me actually I will tell you a number of years living in Mexico for me to finally cross the line where I could say without this episode a it's not gonna be very good now sometimes I like to go back to that idea of of the the direct translation of chilaquiles being chili and greens kale eat this the and so I'm gonna put a little bit of this this dinosaur kale or Tuscan kale in the chilaquiles as well I just think it lightens it up a little bit if you have some spinach on hand you could feel free to put or leave that whole thing out you don't have to put that in there but I just like it in there so I always and I think it adds a nice little variety of textures and flavors so I'm pulling out the central stalk on these guys pulling the leaf off of the central stalk and then I'm going to give it a chop and throw it into the same along with that episode sake in there as that is simmering away okay now we've got that done just do a quick crosscut here because I want it to cook fairly quickly this does need a little bit of time to cook it's not it's not a tender tender tender green like spinach with me so I'll just throw some of it in there like that I'm going to give it a stir just to moisten them all nicely now let's talk about the last thing that we have to talk about here in the making of the the chilaquiles and that will be the chips let's take a look at our piece of chicken here yeah it's done again I'm thinking about what that feels like if you do the fist technique when you do the clenched fist that's well done I want it to have a little tiny bit of give to it because if it was super well done then it wouldn't be it wouldn't be very delicious in the way of my way of thinking so I'm just taking this apart using the tongs like this and I'm just pulling along with thee with the grain of the chicken like that and big coarse shreds and let's talk let's talk chips so in my way of thinking the thicker the chip the better you can make chilaquiles with really thin chips but you have to get them into this sauce and out really quickly or they will just disintegrate in the sauce when we talk about chips usually we're talking about the ones that are made with that special tortilla that I talking about the other day when we did the little roll taquitos that were fried that one is a drier tortilla that is more coarsely ground masa and that fries up light and crisp if you make chilaquiles however with made tortillas or what we would call table tortillas the thicker ones though they may not be the best to eat as chips but they're delicious and chilaquiles because they soften more slowly what I'm working with here is an average chip it's a homemade home-fried chip we it's the same tortilla that I showed you the other day on the taquitos but it's ones that we get and cut up and then fry in our restaurant and it's a sort of medium thick for a frying tortilla it's not going to be that super light and airy chip that maybe some of you really like here now the amount of tortilla chips that you use for chilaquiles is the most important thing I say do it by weight the the amount of tortilla chips that we're doing here to two cups of sauce base plus two cups of broth is is eight ounces so I say do it by weight because that's gonna be the most assured after a while you'll just be able to kind of look at it and say oh it looks like the right amount to me and you're and you'll you'll have enough broth to thicken I mean to coat everything but not so much that it'll be too soupy and not so little that it'll be dry that's one thing that I think is really important about making chilaquiles is that you don't get that make them too dry now some people in the United States that didn't grow up on chilaquiles will make them super dry so that they almost feel like I call them hot hot tortillas and salsa it's like they just like they stop right now and they say okay there we are we're finished with the chilaquiles that's not the cooked dish to me they shouldn't have crunch they should have sure but not crunch so here I am just sort of turning them in this sauce now it's a very interesting thing and you find this all over the world every culture has its own beloved texture when I got to travel in China oh my gosh the textures that people like are so foreign to some of the textures that I'm familiar with but they would get super excited about those textures well in Mexico this crispy fried thing that is softening which in the u.s. we might even say oh it's gotten it was so beautiful with crispy now it's soggy is the beloved texture so you can think about that what's right what's the right texture for you and can you learn to appreciate these other textures that are in here so I'm stirring in now the the chicken and so you can see the episode a leaves the the kale leaves and then I am about ready to call it finished here I'm gonna turn the heat off completely um all of my tortillas are beginning to soften nicely I could give it a couple of more turns just to let it go a little bit more I always take it off the fire right before I think it's perfect because it'll take me a little time to serve it up or as I'm gonna do today I'm just gonna serve it in this beautiful cast-iron pan because I love that cast-iron pan so and it's nice because this is such an informal dish that it's nice to be able to serve it in the vessel that it is cooked in in Mexico a lot of times they'll cook them in an earthenware cazuela and then it looks so beautiful to just set that on to the the table this is our homemade Mexican crema you can use creme fraiche you could use sour cream that's been thinned with a little bit of milk or cream and I'm gonna drizzle that all over the top of this and then next goes the onion so we've got I've got this raw onion that I'm going to just use in rings here I didn't bother to rinse this but that would be a good thing for you to do is to rinse it to get off the stronger onion flavors so that it will be to everyone's liking you hear it at all and then I'm going to sprinkle on Mexican queso on yako this is the aged version of that that cheese that's like a fresh cheese queso fresco and it's got a flavor that's not unlike romano cheese or even parmesan so you could feel free to put that on there and then just because I like to do it I'm going to put some cilantro leaves on the top of it so I'll pull out some of these and just tear the leaves off the top and just let them down all the top of this and I've got to stop because now my really is watering I'm excited to have lunch I hope you will make chilaquiles Verdes my favorite comfort food my favorite soul food from Mexico and I will see you all back here tomorrow thanks for hanging out in the kitchen with me

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 135,667

Rating: 4.91325 out of 5

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Id: ixcCzg54bB8

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020